Parental charm? Check

My parents are on their way over to visit with their grandson. As such, I’ve been instructed to wait outside to help them up with bags bearing gifts – toilet paper, paper towels and, in spite of my objections, a pallet of low-fat cream cheese. Explaining that neither I, Emily or the baby eat cream cheese did not concern my mother in the least. “I’ll leave with what we don’t eat,” she said.

11:42 a.m. They pull up to my door. “Your father can’t find parking,” my mother hollers out the car window. “Go with him and help.” I bring my mother into the apartment with the bags and set off with my father on our quest. “I’ll drive,” I say. My father smiles. “Being chauffeured makes me feel like I’m vacation,” he says from the passenger seat. When he’s with my mother, my father does all of the driving while my mother sits shotgun, elbows bent, pointing her house keys towards the front door lock from forty miles away.

11:54 a.m. After circling around and around the block and debating the meaning of various contradictory parking signs with the fervor of Talmud scholars, we find parking. My father gets out and looks around. “The area looks seedy,” he says. What makes his comment particularly irksome is that we’re literally parked outside my door. We make our way inside. 12:10 a.m. My mother is in full swing, regaling Emily with stories about the first years of her marriage to my father. She re-litigates past wrongs inflicted on her by my father’s mother from over 40 years ago. These stories are intended to be instructive. Though of what, I’m not sure. All through the telling, my father sits at my mother’s side, happily eating a bagel and low-fat cream cheese which, rather than from a plate, he eats off a sheet of paper towel. “He likes it that way,” my mother says when I object.

When I was growing up, any time a roll of toilet paper fell in the toilet, my mother would forbid me from using it, referring to it as “your father’s toilet paper.” “I like it this way,” he mumbles, globs of cream cheese landing on his lap. 12:35 a.m. When we’re done eating, I walk my parents back down to the car. There are no tickets on the windshield. The morning’s been a success. “It’s a shame to leave behind such good parking,” my mother says, “but we have to return the cream cheese before it goes bad. Kiss the baby for us!”